Twist (Book 1): The Abnorm Chronicles-Twist (3 page)

Chapter
5

Ingrid Wolverton leaned against the door to Adam’s seventh-floor apartment in the Lion’s Regency Apartments, not sure whether to be annoyed or worried. She had been knocking for five minutes with no response, and he would not have forgotten about their regular Tuesday-afternoon appointment.

She tried to listen against the wood, but heard nothing. She never did. Adam
Lee was not the type to listen to music, to the TV, to the radio. Even with his disability, his life wasn’t motionless, but he seemed to live his life inside himself.

She straightened
her casual outfit, trying to decide what to do. When going on house calls to patients who couldn’t get out and about, she used the informal dress as a tactic. It helped put the disabled vets at ease, and business suits often created an impenetrable barrier.

She knocked again, heard nothing.
Ingrid wasn’t actively alarmed yet. This happened every few weeks: Adam would go into a kind of trance and shut out the rest of the world. Even though he never went anywhere, never left his apartment, Adam forgot his appointments a lot.

S
he backed away and stared at the door, furrowing her brow as if her gaze could penetrate inside—like his Brilliant gift. He could certainly see her with his security cams, if he chose. Though the Lion’s Regency was low-rent housing, Adam’s apartment had been modernized to meet his unique needs, so he could be technologically extroverted and introverted at the same time. He controlled everything in his apartment from his wheelchair. Buttons did this, switches did that. He could activate the intercom and talk to anyone in the hall, and he could open or close the door automatically.

But he still had to make some effort to answer.

The apartment building had been built in the 1970s, and it hadn’t aged well. Most of the Capitol Hill neighborhood had gone through phase-three renovation in the last two years, but the improvements hadn’t extended to this building yet.

Both elevators were broken
, forcing her to trudge up seven flights of stairs with each personal welfare visit. An inconvenience for her, a prison sentence for Adam.

Even if the elevators had been working, though,
Adam had no inclination to leave his apartment and absolutely no desire to move somewhere else. He just stayed in his bubble and watched the outside world from a distance.

The focus of Ingrid’s therapy was to help him
interact with the rest of society, even as he embraced his isolation from the world. Adam punished himself, and she hadn’t been able to ferret out the “for what” yet.

H
e had obviously suffered deep psychological trauma from his injuries in Special Ops, but Ingrid doubted the explanation was that simple. Getting him to open up and talk was almost impossible, though. His records were classified—Top Secret—and Adam retreated behind the protective wall of secrecy.

W
orking for the VA at a high level, however, Ingrid held a Yankee White clearance. She had read Adam’s files, knew what had happened to him in Cuba, how he’d become paralyzed. But she wanted to give him an opportunity to open up, to express himself, and to be honest with her. Instead, every time she tried to talk about what had happened to him on the mission, he stonewalled. “Can’t talk about it. Sorry. My records are sealed.”

Refusing to answer the door was probably just another way of stonewalling her.
She knocked again.

Even though Ingrid
had been his therapist for some time, the apartment key was another point of tension between them. He was aware that she could let herself into his apartment any time she wanted, even though she had never done so. That would be an invasion of his privacy and a breach of trust. The key was just another thing for him to resent. It was
his
home,
his
apartment,
his
life, why did she have a key?

“
In case of emergency” was never a good enough explanation, but it was the policy of her office. Since he was listed as 100 percent disability, the VA had gone overboard with his treatment, pulling out all the stops to make sure he was well taken care of.

But w
hen he kept her waiting in the hall like this, refusing to answer the door, was Adam testing her? Trying to see how easy it was for her to cross that line?

Still no sound
of the latch, no movement. Today was going to be one of those days when she just ended up waiting. Sometimes he left her out here for as much as forty-five minutes. The alternative—simply using the key and walking in—would do more damage than good. She decided not to knock again, but kept waiting. Ingrid intended to pass his little test.

Chapter
6

“I don’t give a damn!” Davis yelled into the phone. His shout was distant, tenuous, and filtered through the air, across the street and the gap between the buildings, and finally through the glass of the windowpane.

Adam heard it all through his senses
, picked up all the details, reassembled the sounds.

Davis
listened for a moment, and his increasing agitation was palpable. “Look, you’re bleeding me dry. I only make thirty thousand, and twelve of that already goes to you. You know what that leaves me after tax? Ten thousand a year, total, for all my living expenses. No, be quiet, Melinda—you need to listen to this. I’m living at half the poverty line, and you make more of my money than I do. So just stop. Stop. I don’t care about the finances. I don’t care about the money. Let me see my daughter and stop pushing this order to get even more of my money.”

The pudgy
forty-year-old ran his hand through thinning hair. Thanks to too much stress and too little sleep, he had only wisps left on top. Davis paced around the barren studio apartment, little more than a bed and a single dresser, his worldly possessions. Thanks to his angry phone conversations, the man was wearing a groove in the wooden floors. He wiped a sweaty hand on the old T-shirt he was wearing.

Adam
could feel Davis’s tension, his helpless anger, the pent-up and restless need to punch a fist through a wall. He felt for the man, read into him. On the rare occasions when his daughter was around, he had seen firsthand that Davis was a good father. From across the street, through the window, Adam felt absorbed in the other man’s life, the everyday problems—
normal
problems.

But right now the
persistent knocking on Adam’s door kept distracting him. Even though he was absorbed in Davis’s life, a voyeur and eavesdropper from afar, he didn’t really want to watch yet another stressful phone fight unfold.

He did not want
to see Ingrid Wolverton either, so he chose not to respond, but rather remained at the window.

Adam
switched views, scanning the windows of the apartments across from him. The Benedict family, they were usually good for nothing, leading an utterly sedentary and uneventful life by their own choice—not as a result of injuries received in a covert military action. Why would they do that to themselves?

Sure enough, all four
Benedicts were sitting on the long sofa in the living room, watching television as if they were either drugged or paralyzed. The youngest girl was Ariel, nine years old and obsessed with My Little Pony. She curled up next to the couch, already bored with the television but without the ambition to do anything about it. She crossed her arms over the side of the couch and laid her head down on the armrest.

Rick Jr.
was about thirteen, clad in baggy jeans and a shirt that was four times too large for him, an outfit appropriate for his age and clique. Whatever was on the television caught his interest, though, and he was lost in another world. Chantel, the mother, was dressed in burgundy sweats and a comfortable baggy shirt. She was curled up with Richard Sr. who was also raptly watching the tube.

The family that does nothing
together, stays together . . .

The whole room
, in fact their whole existence, pointed at the television. The sofa was on the far wall facing the large flat-screen, and all the furniture was organized around the edges so as not to obstruct the view. The family watched television as if it were a religious prophet speaking to them.

Only Thursdays were different, and not by much. After catching an early program or two,
Richard Sr. would stand up and stretch. “Well, guys, it’s Thursday night. Time for the excitement of my week.” Same thing every Thursday. It was meant to be a joke but, painfully, it wasn’t.

Adam sighed. Every Thursday
, Richard Sr. left for hours to go to his bowling league. It was the only time he wasn’t there in front of the television.

The
Benedict family frustrated Adam. They had everything. They had each other, warmth, love, support. They could go wherever they wanted; they had their health. They could have adventures, see the world, or even just take a walk in the park. And yet, they spent their entire life just like him, trapped in a single room and watching worlds they couldn’t touch. What was the point?

He let his gaze drift.

His eye lighted upon Selene’s window next. The corners of his mouth tugged down into a frown. He liked Selene, and he felt sorry for her. In a way, watching her bedroom escapades provided his only sex life, all he could ever hope for. But he also worried about her, and her choices.

E
ven in early evening she was already taking a ride on the carnal side of life. Sheets and blankets were strewn around her bedroom, piled up against the bed that she used for sex more often than for sleeping. Mirrors adorned her walls and ceiling, making it easy on him.

For Adam
, Selene’s life was a cornucopia of sensory overload. Through the vibrations of her window—and then his—he felt as if he were sitting in the room, right next to them. Every bead of sweat that dripped down her skin teased Adam’s senses, every scream as her partner du jour fulfilled his function. He could almost feel the cold metal of the handcuffs binding her to the bedposts as if they embraced his own wrists.

Watching Selene and her animalistic, enthusiastic lovemaking made his heart race. The blood pounded through his veins, firing through dead muscles, tantalizing nerve endings that no longer functioned.

He shuddered, startled, as Ingrid knocked on the door again. It was too much for him to take.

He blinked, trying to pull back from the picture
, but overpowered by the sensory stimuli. Optical muscles fought Adam’s will, as his subconscious mind overruled his efforts to disengage. The frenzied sex across the street pulled at him, dragging him back in like water down a drain.

The gift
of hyperfocus and long-distance assimilative viewing was not something he could control easily. Anticipating the coming climax in Selene’s world, he fought harder, pulling himself away.

He finally broke his
gaze, and his extended view jerked across the buildings and the milling people below. A hundred little lives played out their momentary dramas. Lies, deception, love, affection. Like hundreds of unwatched channels on TV, a buffet of emotion and circumstance for Adam to consume. The imperfection of it all was his way in, his way to experience.

Ingrid
knocked again. Soon enough, he was sure she would use her key. And he didn’t really want to force her to break that glass ceiling of trust.

Exasperated, Adam pulled his hand back from the window
and severed contact with all those lives, all those possible experiences that flowed to him through his shifting focus. He turned his head to look at the door. She was being more impatient than usual today—or was he just more distracted?

He flicked the control knob for his
wheelchair and backed away from the window. The motorized chair followed his commands, rolling across his central space. In the center of the living room sat one comfortable chair, which was used exclusively by Ingrid on Tuesdays for her regular appointment. Nobody else visited him.

Whenever
Adam faced her, he resisted, hating the therapy process. He didn’t want her or anyone else to talk about his condition. Adam was a once-athletic young man turned into a paraplegic Special Forces vet. How could he not be resentful, angry at the world?

S
ecretly, though, in his heart of hearts, Ingrid’s visits were important to him. He didn’t have to put his hand against the window to interact with her. Didn’t have to live vicariously. For an entire four hours a week, he could pretend that he was human again, that he wasn’t trapped in his tower.

He keyed another button on the arm of his wheelchair
, and a small speaker in his headrest crackled with quiet static. He turned toward the microphone. “Who is it?”

A willfully ignorant question?
Passive resistance?

“
Adam, you know it’s me.”

He smiled to himself softly
. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Ingrid. One second.”

Adam keyed
two more buttons to activate his home systems. The deadbolt unlatched, and the door opened inward. His therapist stood in the entryway. Ingrid gave him a sardonic smile. “I’m glad you’re finally ready for me.” She strutted into the apartment and closed the door behind her. “Shall we get started?”